It was a 16th-century saint who first introduced
Armando Maggi, PhD’95, associate professor of Italian literature and
culture, to Renaissance demons. Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi, a Florentine
mystic and visionary, channeled voices from heaven while her fellow Carmelite
nuns took notes, recording every utterance, every outburst, every monologue
and momentous silence. De’ Pazzi’s encounters with Jesus and
the Holy Father filled entire volumes, but when demons spoke to her, she
refused to listen.

Maggi, on the other hand, couldn’t resist. After writing two books
on de’ Pazzi—a linguistic analysis and a translation of her
selected revelations—he turned his attention to the fallen angels
and damned spirits she repudiated. What he found was no small measure of
humanity.

“In fact, human beings and fallen angels have a lot in common,”
says Maggi, whose second book on Renaissance demonology, In the Company
of Demons: Unnatural Beings, Love, and Identity in the Italian Renaissance
(University of Chicago Press), is due out in April 2006. “Both
humans and devils are banned from heaven, both exiled. For some reason,
humans have a second chance, but since demons have no conversation with
God anymore, they turn to us. And what they talk about is this, over and
over: their fall, their exile, denial, damnation. This is what they know.
They try to convince us that damnation is the only way to go, because that
is what they experience.”

Examining the writings of Renaissance theologians and philosophers, Maggi
has unearthed complex and often paradoxical beliefs about demonic intervention
in human affairs. Early modern theorists, he says, described satanic beings
overwhelmed with compassion for mortal suffering, devils in love with men
and women, even a banished race of half-human, half-demonic creatures—the
unhappy offspring of unholy unions. As much as demons afflicted humans,
it was clear to Renaissance scholars that they also needed them.

“It is not a one-way relationship,” Maggi says. “And
even though they do not have bodies, demons can even fall in love. The demonologist
Girolamo Menghi relates a strange story about a young man in northern Italy
who is followed by a demonic spirit. The demon is infatuated with this person,
and in order to keep close to him, it takes the physical form of a man,
sometimes a schoolteacher, sometimes a butler or a knight on horseback.
Usually you associate a demonic presence with damnation and seduction, but
this spirit doesn’t do anything like that. It steals fish to please
the young man. So we must conclude that there is some category of demonic
spirits that have compassion at their core.”

Compassion—and humility—also guide Maggi’s scholarship.
Rather than hunting for historical and social explanations for Renaissance
beliefs or psychoanalyzing believers, he engages 500-year-old demonological
theories on their own terms. It’s an approach few scholars take, he
says, and one that might render his work “preposterous or naive”
in the eyes of more traditional researchers. He’s willing to take
that chance. “When we apply our own ‘enlightened’ views,
we cover their culture and minimize their theology,” he says. “We
don’t really understand it. We project our contemporary knowledge
on knowledge that is not like ours. You have to learn their idiom. You have
to allow a suspension of disbelief.”

Scholarly reviews of Satan’s Rhetoric, Maggi’s 2001
book on language and semiotics in Renaissance demonology, endorsed his approach.
In Medium Aevum, published by Oxford’s Society for the Study
of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, critic Matthew Woodcock praised Maggi’s
“highly original study”; Theological Studies called
Satan’s Rhetoric “a rollicking ride for those who may feel more
comfortable standing on the terra firma of social history” than wading
into the open waters of rhetorical analysis. Renaissance Forum
reviewer Peter Corbin, meanwhile, echoed Maggi’s discomfort with social-historical
readings of centuries-old texts. Recent demonology studies, Corbin lamented,
often reveal “rather more about modern critical presuppositions than
early modern beliefs.”

Freed of modern presuppositions, Maggi reads closely and carefully, teasing
apart Renaissance texts, both well-known and obscure. He sees shades of
classical culture in the gentlest demons. For instance, quoting the ancient
historian Livy, Niccolo Machiavelli wrote that strange natural occurrences
might be demonic attempts to warn humans of looming disaster. “Machiavelli
speaks specifically about the 1494 invasion of Italy by the French,”
Maggi says. “Beforehand, people heard soldiers marching in the sky.
So this is a different kind of spirit, a spirit that cannot help but feel
sympathy for us”—a spirit that has a pagan past, Maggi suggests.

“When Christianity tried to reduce all classical gods to this idea
of Satan,” he says, “there was a problem, because some gods
didn’t do anything bad. The Lares were souls of dead ancestors and
family members, gods that looked after the household. What evil do they
do? What evil does the spirit following the young man do?”

Similarly puzzling, Maggi says, is St. Anthony’s desert encounter
with a man who has demonic features. “Anthony panics,” Maggi
says. But the creature explains that he comes from a whole civilization
of half demons, self-exiled out of fear for their safety in human society.
“This being asks Anthony, ‘Please pray for us, because we want
to be saved,’” Maggi says. “This is extraordinary. It
is not a demon threatening a human; he’s asking him to pray on his
behalf. Through history, scholars tried to make sense of this.” Theologians
debated whether a demon and a human could produce a child, what physical
characteristics such a hybrid might inherit, and the likelihood that St.
Anthony’s outcast colony actually existed. Wooliest of all, though,
was the issue of salvation. “Can they be saved?” Maggi asks.
“We don’t know. It is only a question.”

Even unanswered, he says, that question offers insight into religious thought
at a time when divergent beliefs simultaneously held sway. While de’
Pazzi closed her ears to the devils she claimed chased her, bit her, and
pushed her down staircases, other theologians saw something familiar and
sympathetic in demons. The St. Anthony story is “about compassion,
about exile, about being somebody not likely to be saved but who wants to
be,” Maggi says. “Not only should we not be afraid of these
hybrid beings, but we should realize that they need us, and if we are Christians,
we should open ourselves to them.”